New York – Thanksgiving Holiday

At Thanksgiving holiday I went to visit the famous city of NEW YORK. It was amazing, I have never taken so many pictures in one trip. I went to Statue of Liberty, Empire State, Time Square, Wall Street, the ruins of World Trade Center, Rockefeller center, Central Park, Union Square, Metropolitan museum, Museum of Natural Art, etc… Every single part of New York you have seen in at least one movie.

One of the best things was to meet Amber again and spent some time together. We had a lot of fun and very nice conversations besides going to the Latin nightclub that was great.

I also meet Sarah, Arthur and Barbara; friends who were in Argentina some time ago. It was great to see them again. Sarah host me at her apartment in Manhattan, beautiful and very convenient place.

The Thanksgiving dinner with Arthur’s family was the best culture experience so far. We had a great traditional Thanksgiving dinner with a very typical New York family. They explained us the history of Thanksgiving, we talked about US politics, US healthy system and eat a delicious food.

New York is definitely one of the best places to visit in the world.

You can see all my pictures at facebook: www.facebook.com

Paintball

The amazing advertisements of US army finally convinced us and we decided to go to the war. A group of Chinese, led by our core worker Iping, invited us for a paintball evening at the same day of Elias´s birthday.

Some Kraft AIESEC trainees and some DHL AIESEC trainees joined the group of Chinese and we played Paintball in a very cool real field and in an artificial training field. It was the first time that I played and I enjoyed it very much.

I was really impressed by some people who are fanatic about Paintball and they have all kinds of imitation of real weapons in a paintball version. They even dress like Rambo, it really looks that are in the war.

Learning

At the end of the day we are living an AIESEC exchange experience so we supposed to have a strong professional experience, a cultural experience in a global learning environment. Unfortunately AIESEC US really sucks and there is no local committee in South Florida to support us on that. So we started to organize some activities by ourselves. Once we went to visit DHL Miami Gateway that was really cool to understand more about the company and create a better network among the interns.

Some weeks ago we had a learning event where we started with a Brazilian lunch and then a discussion about Brazilian culture. After that we had a very cool learning circle about the development model of the countries we had represented: Brazil, Russia, Mexico and Colombia and correlating with the development model of China, India and US. It is always amazing how much you can learn just by sitting and having a structure talk with smart people. We really need to take the opportunity to learn from the bright people we have around. To finish the day we had Russian desert and watched the Brazilian movie: ¨Tropa de Elite¨ all together. The movie shows very much about a big current issue in Brazil: violence. This movie for me is AMAZING !!!

Um dia de patrao !!!

One of our great friends here, Karina Trujillo, was celebrating her birthday last weekend. She invited all of the AIESEC inters and rented 3 rooms at Sheraton Miami. We went Saturday afternoon, set ourselves in the room and went to the swimming pool to drink some beers. We had almost private beach, beautiful palms around, the moon was full and we decided to go to the Jacuzzi during night before the party. We dressed up and went to a night club at South Beach called Macarena. At Macarena we had dinner, I eat an Argentinean dish and we had ¨free¨sangria for the whole night. After the dinner the party started: salsa, merengue, reggeaton!!! We had a great party !!! The next day, back to Sheraton, we were recovering beside the pool, enjoying the view and the landscape.

The interns here in Florida have a quite hard life… look the pictures!!! I am so happy !!!

Cooking

After moving from my home city (Belo Horzizonte-Brazil) I was cooking a lot my first months in Sao Paulo. The last two years I have been quite busy having no time for cooking but on these first months here in the US I started to cook again. The main reasons are that I have time and I would like to have a health life here, with is kind of hard in the US. The other big reason is because here I can find all the ingredients to cook Brazilian food, there is a huge Brazilian community and even Brazilian markets. Actually I can even have Açaí, Guaraná, Pao de quiejo, speak Portuguese in some places. There is many ways to be really connect with my country.

But the focus of this post is cooking. I am very proud to show you the picture of my favorite dish ¨Frango com Quiabo¨ or ¨Chinken with Okra¨. I found all the ingredients and I was really excited cooking and of course eating it. I also went to a restaurant called ¨Chico Mineiro¨ once where I could eat this dish at one Sunday watching a Brazilian soccer game from ¨Brasileirao 2007¨ at Globo. It was a very good feeling.

Once we did a Brazilian lunch and Pablo cooked ¨Feijoada¨ for us. Look how beautiful the dish was!!! We also had ¨Caipirinha¨ and some Tequila. Las week I cooked some beef, ¨moela¨, rice, bean, etc…

I am gaining weight J AEEEE

Volunteer experiences

I had two experiences going to volunteer with some NGOs here in South Florida. Both experiences were through DHL. First we went play and have fun with some kids Saturday morning . It was very cool and I supposed to play with them but the problem was that I don’t know how to play their games (American football, kick ball, baseball) and they don’t like to play our games (soccer, volleyball). I learnt a lot and I had a lot of fun with the kids anyway. They taught me!!!

The other opportunity was when I went to build a house in a poor neighborhood with the NGO “Habitat for humanity”. Our DH group was responsible to cover the roof with an impermeable material. This one was very hard. We need to put the material and stick it hammering some nails through a metal disk. It was very hard and physically demanding but we accomplished the task. Our fingers were hurt after hammering it many times.

Fortunately their concept of poorness is very different from ours. The house that we build would be a very good one in Brazil and here were a supposed poor house in dangerous neighborhood.

This week I subscribed to the disaster team at DHL. When we have some global disaster, like the earthquake in Peru, DHL send some employee offering your core competence: “logistic and transportation¨ to support the people. Let’s see if they will select me.

Love

Sometimes you need to travel very far to find a true love: Egypt, Argentina, Turkey. But we still have many places to go: USA, Ukraine, Brazil.

The most important is that we are together and in love. The future belongs to us.